Learn widely
Leia and Luke crash land on Mimban, are arrested by stormtroopers, fall in with a pair of drunk aliens, escape, float on giant lily-pads, then chop off Darth Vader’s arm. This is the official 1978 novel sequel to Star Wars.
Samuel Beckett wrote one of the shortest performed plays in the world on the back of a postcard. The first staging still managed to mess it up.
Want to be on the radio? Try saying this first: “The seething sea ceased to see, then thus sufficeth thus.”
The sci-fi author and pacifist H. G. Wells invented one of the first miniature war games.
There is a courtyard gallery in the Palazzo Spada in Rome that is designed to fool the eye. It looks like it should be 37 metres long, but in fact it’s only 8 metres in total.
The Centro Financiero Confinanzas skyscraper was unfinished at the time of the 1994 Venezuelan banking crisis. In 2007, squatters moved in.
The kilt was banned in 1746, forcing the Scots to wear “the unmanly dress of the Lowlander.”
In 1971, Mongolia’s Minister of Culture decided that the country needed its own rock band, and so Soyol Erdene was born.
Monet’s 1890-1891 painting series Les Meules à Giverny captured haystacks at multiple times of the day, seasons, and weather conditions. He did this by painting several canvases at once, swapping them as the day changed.
From 1864 to 1904, a vast underground network smuggled illegal books into Russian-controlled Lithuania.
Ally Sloper, created and drawn by the husband-wife team of Charles Ross and Émilie de Tessier, was the first recurring comic strip character.
The Dutch Renaissance scholar Desiderius Erasmus wrote a textbook of rhetoric in which he illustrated the flexibility of language by writing the sentence “Your letter delighted me greatly” one hundred and ninety-five different ways.
How many ways can you move a bridge to let boat traffic through? Well, you can lift it, fold it, curl it, retract it, tilt it, swing it, or submerge it.
A woman walks down a street at night. The scene is silent but for her footsteps. Suddenly there’s a hiss and scream like a wild cat… but it’s only a bus. This is Cat People, the first sound film to use a jump scare.
The 1960 Oakeshott typology is a military historian’s attempt to classify the full range of European medieval swords.
In the United States, prisoners used to be chained to trees. In Australia, prisoners used to be put inside trees.
The Generalist Academy 